


Ellipses

by worldturtling



Category: Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Canonical Character Death, POV Count Olaf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 19:17:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4576605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worldturtling/pseuds/worldturtling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a girl. And a town. And a smell.<br/>Or, a story about the sentence that was their relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ellipses

There was a town, and a girl, and a smell, and a time when they were all together in the same place.

It was an ordinary town, or at least it seemed so on the surface. But it was no ordinary girl, he couldn’t have mistaken her for that if he was blind.

And it was no ordinary smell. No one should ever be accustomed to the scent of burning rooftops.

 

He was wrong about that last part.

-

She looks at him from across the theater, bright eyes glimmering. He squeezes the hat in his hand erratically, as if it could calm the flutter of nerves.

In a bathroom stall, while the fat lady sings, their ankles bump together, twin marks seeking each other out. Her heels scratch his calf, and he holds onto her like she’s the only oxygen tank at the bottom of the deepest ocean. He doesn’t know how long to stick around for after she leaves him, her lipstick stuck bright red on his face.

-

It’s not like they get to stay together, people like them don’t. They don’t get to know anybody for longer than a case generally. It’s one of their _rules_. He never really cared for them to begin with, recounts a few times he was almost thrown out of school because he wasn’t reading what they wanted. Because he wasn’t indulging in the whole not cheating thing. Maybe he had better things to do with his afternoons than codebreaking.

He doesn’t even remember wanting to join the stupid organization in the first place.

He’s waiting at a trainstation in Calcutta, irritable from the heat and the thick moist air. But then she taps him on the shoulder, and her face is ashen.

And she smells…so distinctly like something he should consider wrong.

“I couldn’t stop it,” she mutters into the threadbare sheet that night. “Worse than that,” her eyes are round and alarmed, like she had been wounded, though she didn’t have a scratch on her, “I didn’t want to.”

A library had burned down. Run by a foreign government to record debts over the various small struggling villages.

He wants to scoff but she would get angry, maybe try to pin him on morals again. As if it wasn’t his bad boy nature that didn’t attract her when they were school children. (it wasn’t, she tells him later, one day, much later, it was because you helped me out of the tunnel.)

-

He was orphaned much much earlier than Kit ever was. Her parents were at least alive for a good period of her lifetime.

His were not so fortunate. All he knows is he was nine when they came to escort him into a car. He later realized They were an organization recruiting children to fight fires voluntarily.

“Why did they take us so young?”

“Because adults are too stupid.” She replies automatically.

They kissed at fifteen. He didn’t see her again until they were sixteen and she was escaping on a hot air balloon from attacking villagers, and he ran in to help cut the ropes.

 

When would they become stupid?

-

He finds out later.

-

There was a girl. And a town. And a smell.

The town was his. His home town, which he never saw again after he left. And it had a theater. And it had his parents.

And there was a girl. Who, by a series of circumstances, ended up carrying twin syringes. They would be filled with poison.

And there was a smell. A horrible smell. Burning flesh in a theater. Burning flesh off a dead corpse that was his mother, another his father.

They say don’t kill the messenger. She had not been told for what reason, or for who. She was a carrier. She was a mode of transportation.

But when the pieces come together, its Olaf who is shot.

He points a pistol at her anyway. He gets her clean in the shoulder. The bright red on her white coat matches the red on her lips.

He runs.

-

He admits to not caring what kind of attitude he displays to the world anymore. He admits to using it back for all the ways it tried to leech from him. Was that so wrong? Was it really so bad? Who had the moral argument here, this world was full of villains.

Okay, he admits, on too much gin, when he thinks he sees Kit in the corner of the room, next to a sleeping Esme (so much better as a partner. She sticks around, she doesn’t have secrets except about who’s credit card she’s using, and in general, she’s so much better at looking after herself) “It was fucked to try and make a young girl my child bride.” He admits with effacing intent.

And that’s the time to break facts. He’s evil.

“I’m evil,” he tells the shadow in the room, “you always knew it. It’s what I am. What do you expect?”

“You’re terrorizing those poor orphans.”

“Their parents made me an orphan.”

“That isn’t an excuse, you know it isn’t.”

“I know it isn’t. The fact is I don’t care.” He doesn’t.

She doesn’t respond.

Of course, she isn’t really there to begin with. In the morning he looks to the corner and sees an empty corner.

And a handkerchief.

-

The real Kit is a visceral nightmare when he next sees her. He says a few crass words. Ones he regrets leaving his mouth when they do, but Esme is there and he has a game to play.

Her red lips are furious and so is her hand, nails scratching his face deep.

“Not so noble now, are we?” He sneers the moment he sees she’s drawn blood.

Her face colors, and for a brief moment he flashes to a night in a tent in a forbidden kelp forest.

-

They’re stalking orphans to their destination, a hotel, when he spots her once again. She is pregnant. She is distraught.

And she’s building a bomb. Metaphorically speaking. It’s a ticking sensation, one he’s never felt before in all his years but seeing her again has him on the verge of wondering.

Where did the time go?

-

The first time they’d ever kissed she’d been holding a gun to his neck the whole time. She had forgotten about it. There was a safety trigger and she never turned it off once.

Now he was holding a harpoon gun to her.

-

There was an ocean, and a woman, and a smell.

The ocean washed the woman up on a crate. She was pregnant. Distraught.

 

 

The smell… brine and blood. And shit.

He never really expected they would be doing this. This is the last think he thought they would ever do together.

But it is the last thing they do together.

He’s horrible. She’s good. She did something that let something horrible happen to him, something he never thought he’d find it in him to forgive her for. But his last thoughts, hazy as they are, is that, selfishly, he wants her to live and remember him.

She won’t, probably. But he pretends she will.

He doesn’t pretend he actually deserves anything good from all this. He was far beyond that conception.

-

There was a girl.


End file.
